Obama tells Africa forum 'no reason' for press restriction

One out of 10 delegates participating this week in U.S. President Barack Obama's Young African Leaders Forum was a journalist. The forum, a U.S. initiative meant to spark discussions on the future of Africa in a year when 17 countries on the continent are celebrating 50 years of nationhood, did not overlook freedom of the press, as I witnessed in its final event on Thursday at Washington's museum of news, the Newseum.

The venue for Thursday's
event, a conference center named after the publisher John S. Knight, was
perhaps fitting after the forum's Tuesday town
hall meeting at the White House featured significant references to press
freedom. Addressing 115 of the brightest and most enterprising 20- to 30-something
leaders in activism,
business, health, innovation and media in Africa on Tuesday, Obama singled out,
among others, a Botswana journalist (Itumeleng Ramsden)
for inspiring young people with her popular radio show, and a
journalist from Ivory Coast (Aminata
Kane Epse Kone) for championing the cause of Muslim women on her radio
station. In a Q&A session, the president mentioned press freedom
while praising the ability of youth to challenge the status quo.

"In some of your countries, freedom of the press is still
restricted," Obama said. "There's no reason why that has to be the case. There's
nothing inevitable about that. And young people are more prone to ask
questions, why shouldn't we have a free press?"

Bold and unprecedented, the administration's
approach to honor this ambitious Facebook generation (and there were numerous
references to the social networking
platform on Thursday, and not only from the participants), clearly raised
eyebrows outside the U.S.
At the end of Thursday's event, columnist and activist Tiémoko Antoine Assale, a
delegate from Ivory Coast,
told the audience how, before his departure, he received a phone call from a
government official who was upset because he had not received an invitation
from Washington.

As noted
by the New York Times' Adam Nossiter, Washington's approach was a
dramatic departure from France's recent gathering of leaders
of its former colonies during Bastille Day celebrations in July. The
keynote event of those celebrations was a military parade featuring African soldiers.
They marched on the Champs-Élysée along with French troops, and the sound of their
bootsdrowned out local and international civil society protests
over human
rights and democracy concerns. French media quoted TV presenter Etienne
Leenhard of state-funded France
2 as saying on the air that "Politically speaking, there are no dictatorships
in Francophone Africa," as he gestured
over a map of the continent.

In Washington however, the U.S.
State Department engaged the participants in thematic focus groups such as leadership,
entrepreneurship, social responsibility, interfaith dialogue, and even "Advocacy,
Transparency, and Human Rights."

African governments dominate,
monopolize, or politically censor national public media, but in many countries,
government outlets are the only ones with the capacity to broadcast to the
entire population. This leads to the suppression of voices of civil society or
the opposition during election cycles. For instance, Welcom Romell Nzaba Nodjitolom, a human rights jurist from the Republic of Congo, described how the elite in power controls
four of the five TV stations in his country. According to our research, in the
Republic of Congo, there is the state-run Télé-Congo (considered
to be the mouthpiece of the government), private DRTV (owned by Army General
Norbert Dabira), private Top TV (owned by Claudia Nguesso, the daughter of
President Denis
Sassou-Nguesso), TV
Réhoboth (owned by pastor Germain Ndéké, a maternal uncle of the president's
late wife Edith), and a fledging newcomer, MN TV, named after the
president's older brother, Maurice
Nguesso.

Bai Sama Gwenning
Best, the marketing manager for Liberia's Observer, a leading independent newspaper started by
his father, Kenneth Best--Liberia's best-known journalist and a pioneer of the
independent press in the Gambia--spoke to me about the need to educate security
forces in African countries to respect frontline reporters. DRC
journalist Yomboranyama
Ngambashongo Anice shared his difficulties in finding fundraising partners to
support the activities of his journalism training and capacity-building organization
known by its French acronym as APIC. Then Sana Sarr, an unreserved IT
professional from Gambia
challenged me to answer questions about Gambian journalists: "Where is Chief Manneh? Who
killed Deyda
Hydara?"

When I suggested that
perhaps we would know the answers to these questions by now if more people in
the Gambia,
outside the media community, asked such questions, he said that just the act of
asking can land you in jail. He was right, and no one knows this better than
the six Gambian press union leaders who were thrown
into prison last summer over a press release criticizing the president's
insensitive remarks over the unsolved murder of editor Hydara. Four of the
journalists are still living in exile.

Mohamed Keita is advocacy coordinator for CPJ's Africa Program. Keita has written about independent journalism and development in sub-Saharan Africa for publications including The New York Times and Africa Review, and has appeared on NPR, the BBC, Al-Jazeera, and Radio France Internationale. Keita has also given presentations on press freedom at the World Bank, U.S. State Department, and universities. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ.

Comments

Thank you a lot for these interesting news concerning our domain. These news about the comments the US president made about the media in Africa were not echoed by the state-owned TV and radio here. And I guess, that was not mentioned in the Gambia as well as in DRC and Rwanda... Hassim, I think just like Best from Liberia that the police should be educated to respect all journalists and their lives. But the first people who need such a training are our heads of states. The police is nothing but an instrument in their hands. They are almost all bad leaders.

As the storm over Wikileaks Afghan War Logs shows, the media in the west isn't as free as it likes to make out. In the US for example, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media were supine. Nobody dared to be critical for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. The distinguished Patricia Williams gave the Martin Luther King memorial lecture in 2004 and in it she spoke of a climate of fear that had swept US newspaper editors and how the Sacramento Bee editor was booed by high school students for having the temerity to be critical of the occupation of Iraq.

The only difference between Western journalists and African ones is that the former are not likely to be tortured if they are critical of the state, but media censorship DOES exist in the west and pressure IS brought to bear on the western media not to write about CERTAIN things. Perhaps this is why Western journalists are all too happy to shine an investigative spotlight on wrong doing in other parts of the world because they can't do it at home.